Evince is an open source document viewer application for the GNOME desktop environment. It is integrated directly into the controversial desktop, allowing users to view all sorts of documents. The program’s goal is to replace the multitude of document viewers that exist for the GNOME project, such as gPDF, GGV, and Xpdf, with a single, intuitive and simple application that does what is says on the tin.

Supports a wide range of document file formats

Among the supported file formats, we can mention PDF, PostScript, DJVU, DVI, multi-page TIFF, XPS, and SyncTex. In addition, various comics book formats are supported by Evince, including CBR, CBZ, CB7 and CBT.

Offers built-in integrated search functionality

For a quite simple and straightforward application, Evince comes with built-in integrated search, page thumbnails, and page indexing functionality. By default it is distributed with the GNOME desktop environment, but you can easily install it in any other open source desktop environment, as a standalone application.

Dubbed Document Viewer

If you’re a GNOME user, you won’t even notice Evice. Simply because there’s no need to add a launcher for it, or to search the app in GNOME Shell. Just double click a supported document and it will be automatically opened by Evince. The application is dubbed Document Viewer under the GNOME desktop environment, as well as on many Linux distributions.

Features at a glance

It allows users to open or save a copy of the current document, print the current page or an entire document, as well as to open the folder that contains the current document. Among other interesting features, we can mention the ability to search PDF documents, zoom in or out documents, jump to a desired page, add bookmarks, and view the fonts used in the current document.

The default document viewer of GNOME

We said it before, and we’ll say it again: Evince is the default document for GNOME, and this means that there’s no need for us to recommend this software to anyone who uses the GNOME desktop environment.

Evince was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on March 25th, 2015